CHENNAI: Tedx NapierBridge, Chennai’s own TEDx community, recently screened exclusive full length sessions at the SPI Cinemas corporate office from the TED 2018 conference held at Vancouver. Themed ‘The Age of Amazement’, the sessions shared some thought-provoking concepts about the future of technology. The screening was divided into two sessions with three speakers each of 15 minutes followed by a break.
After every session, there was a poll on their Instagram page, followed by an interactive session. The audience had an opportunity to voice their opinion and listen to others. “We’ve been organising shows since July 2014. We are a team of 13 and we all meet only during the weekends. Our tagline is ‘Ideas worth sharing’. So we make sure that there is take away, sharing, and contribution from every session to build a better community,” shared Shyam Sundar, who holds the license for TEDxNapierBridge.
The first session had Nora Atkinson, artist and participant at the Burning Man Art Festival in 2017. She spoke about her ideas of art. Next, Vishaan Chakrabarti, professor of Architecture, shared his opinions on creating cities of difference. Lastly, Ian Firth, a bridge designer, spoke about building bridge as a connectivity and community tool.
The second session was into science fiction, gaming, and technology. It started with David Cage on storytelling through video games. In his games audience are the protagonist, and they make decisions and tell stories. It was followed by Karen Meech who studied Omuammua, assumed to be a chunk of rocky debris from a new star system. It was about extraterrestrial civilisations. Lastly, The last speaker for the day was Stephen Webb who focused on planet and existence of humanity.
The session wrapped up with a one sentence TED Talk where participants were asked to send their responses to the question ‘Over the past year, when I’ve thought of the world’s future my main emotions have been what? Because of what?’. Their next big salon is expected to be around the end of May.